


By Any Other Name

by Duganator01



Category: RWBY
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Fall of Beacon (RWBY), Flowers, Fluff and Angst, Multi, That Major Character Death tag is for Pyrrha, Volume 3 (RWBY)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-06
Updated: 2020-03-25
Packaged: 2021-02-27 09:33:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 8
Words: 6,595
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22455007
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Duganator01/pseuds/Duganator01
Summary: Everybody had soulmates.Some had many, some had none, and most were not romantic. The flowers were the one thing they all had in common. All across Remnant when one person received an injury, their soulmate would bloom flowers.
Relationships: Blake Belladonna & Ruby Rose & Weiss Schnee & Yang Xiao Long, Jaune Arc & Pyrrha Nikos & Lie Ren & Nora Valkyrie, Jaune Arc/Pyrrha Nikos, Ozma/Salem (RWBY), Penny Polendina & Ruby Rose, Saphron Cotta-Arc/Terra Cotta-Arc, Summer Rose/Taiyang Xiao Long
Comments: 12
Kudos: 130





	1. Black-Eyed Susans

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A golden yellow flower for a golden yellow girl. And a black eye, for her fighting spirit.

Everybody had soulmates.

Some had many, some had none, and most were not romantic. The flowers were the one thing they all had in common. All across Remnant when one person received an injury, their soulmate would bloom flowers. 

Yang didn’t think there’d ever been a time when she didn’t know that her sister was one of her soulmates. It certainly hadn’t been Ruby’s flowers blooming across her skin that clued her in. No, a year or so after her sister had been born, Yang tripped coming back into the house and scuffed her knees.

Blood had welled up in the scrapes, beading next to the tiny bits of gravel, but the only thing that had mattered to her was that her baby sister had started crying from the next room.

She jumped up, running on toddler’s legs to check on her, and found that her sister had stopped crying. Ruby was staring with wide silver eyes at the yellow petals spreading across her knees. The toddler reached out with one tiny fist, clearly intent on testing to see if this new thing was safe in the only way toddlers knew how: By stuffing it into her mouth. 

With one swift movement Yang scooped up her sister, and in the same moment her dad burst through the door. “Yang, where’s Ruby?”

“I got her, Dad!” Yang said brightly, holding up Ruby proudly. Ruby was still trying to get to the flowers that were just out of reach. Taiyang’s tear-stained eyes widened at the sight of the black-eyed susans sprouting across his youngest daughter’s kneecaps, and they widened still further when he caught sight of the scraped knees Yang had recently received. 

After putting the flowers in water, Taiyang sat his oldest down and explained the concept of soulmates as best he could. 

A few years later when Ruby was old enough to get into trouble, Yang had deep red roses join her collection of Purple and White. Taiyang tried not to let himself think of how the roses were so familiar. Tried not to think of how he knew he’d never sprout the white mirror of them again. 


	2. Crocuses

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Small purple petals, meant to grow and live in the shadows, but also the first sign of new life after the long dark.

When Blake started coming home from school looking like she robbed a flower shop, Ghira sat her down and explained soulmates to her. Yellow and White grew and came to decorate the pages of her books, and soon Red joined them. Dried and pressed between paper to keep them safe, Blake carried her soulmates with her as she fought to gain the rights her people had never known. 

When her father stepped down and her mother followed him, Blake called them cowards and continued to fight. At this point in her life she was no longer sprouting bouquets at any given time, but that was a good thing. It meant that whoever her soulmates were, they were okay now. So she would be okay in the White Fang without them.

She was not okay. 

Bruises never became flowers, and for a while Blake was comforted by this or her soulmates would be covered in flowers by now. 

The fighting became more violent. As time went on, Blake fought for her life daily. Adam was by her side to remind her that she didn’t need her soulmates, after all, he had none. For a while Blake believed him and almost seemed to forget about her soulmates. Then again, for a little while there, she almost seemed to forget herself. 

She was terrified constantly. Adam grew somehow darker and more distant, but he clung to her. Reminded her of all the things that her mind whispered to her in the dark nights. Blake was terrified of him, horrified of who he was becoming, but how could she leave? The White Fang was the only thing she’d ever known. 

Some nights, she’d wake up and the camp would be quiet and Adam wouldn’t be there and she’d look down to see a small flower in the dark murky world that was her life. Blake would remember then just how wrong her life was going. After placing the flower in one of her books, the petals safe among their Red and White counterparts, she’d weep and realize more than ever that she had to get away. 

The sooner the better. 


	3. Snowdrops

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> White petals dropping like new fallen snow. No color, but new hope blooms after the long winter.

Weiss welcomed the flowers. They were spots of color in an otherwise monochrome life. Klein had explained to her what the blooms met, and soon enough her room was decorated with vases of Red, Yellow, and Purple. Out of all of them, Yellow injured themselves the most, and Weiss often found herself rolling her eyes as yellow petals fanned across her shins or her elbows. 

It didn’t take her long to realize that her mother and father did not share flowers. When her mother cut herself on a shattered wine glass at dinner, Weiss had glanced at her father’s hand. Somewhere subconsciously she felt like she’d always known, but a part of her was still shocked when her father did not bloom in the same place where Klein was now bandaging her mother’s hand. 

It hadn’t hurt less to see, though. 

For a while in her early teens, Purple had overtaken Yellow in terms of most flowers bloomed. Crocuses filled every vase in her room almost to spilling over, put there in hopes that Purple would heal quickly. Weiss enrolled in combat school, against her father’s wishes, and wondered what flowers were blooming on her soulmates’ faces when the knight cut her. 

One day though, Purple stopped blooming. Soon after, Yellow did as well. 

What had happened to them? The stress of her new school work compounded with worry over her soulmates. The teacher told them that they would be getting their Auras activated by the end of the week, but she could barely hear him. Had she somehow lost all of her soulmates? She’d taken their presence for granted for so long, and for her life to suddenly be stripped of all color was devastating. 

Weiss couldn’t go and live in that cold white house. Not anymore. 

After her Aura was activated, she thought she understood what had happened. A projection of her soul now protected her from physical harm. No more bruises, and certainly no more of the cuts necessary for flowers. If Yellow and Purple had also just had their Auras activated, then that would explain the drop in blooms. 

Roses still sprouted, and Weiss clung to the color they gave her. Yellow and Purple still got hurt very occasionally, and she added their blooms to the growing arrangements of Red in her room. Her father still demanded that she sing and tried to control her life, tried to keep her under his thumb, but she had something that he never could take away. 

Her Semblance was the same as Winter’s and it grew more powerful every day with training and practice. He couldn’t have that, as he had married into the Schnee name for power alone. 

And Jacques was alone, for Weiss knew he hadn’t married her mother for love, and there was another way they differed. She had people out there waiting for her. 

Weiss just had to find them. 


	4. Water Lilies

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ripples of calm float the flowers across a pond. Waves any larger would rip the delicate petals.

When Ren was five his mother sat him down and explained what it meant when flowers in Yellow, Pink, and Red bloomed like a sunset across his knees. She pulled out a book, showed him the pressed flowers inside, and told him that they meant that there were people out in the world meant just for him. His eyes widened at the flowers sitting snugly within the pages of the books. Pink lay intertwined with Green, with sketches and descriptions of each part of the flower.

Whenever the flowers bloomed for him, he would take the petals and scatter them on the windowsills of his room, as his mother did with the green petals of his father’s flowers. She said that this would keep his soulmates safe, and grant them a speedy recovery from the injuries they’d gained.

His father protected their village, and his mother gained more blooms than he had from her. The scent of orchids was never absent from their home.

Ren’s mother was fascinated by the flowers and studied them extensively. Ren sometimes would watch her work, and she would share interesting tidbits with him occasionally. Usually, however, he would fall asleep at the table to her calm voice as she would read from her notes

Years passed, and Ren grew older. A girl arrived in their village with bright orange hair and ratty clothes. There was something familiar about her, but Ren couldn’t say what it was for the life of him. After all, he’d never met her before. 

His mother kissed him goodnight and tucked him in for bed. It seemed like he’d only closed his eyes for a second when his mother was shaking him awake and telling him to run. Before he could even comprehend what was happening, the ceiling was gone, and there was a monster there. A horrible crashing cacophony filled the tiny room and in the split second before he was gone again, Ren could only see the terror in his mother’s eyes.

He was outside now. He was only half awake, being carried in his father’s arms, and his blurry mind was slow to remember what was going on. Ren had been asleep, and his mother had woken him. His mother, who… where was she? Where was she?!

“Father...where’s Mother?” He asked, still halfway between sleeping and waking. When his father gave no sign of answering him, the fire and the screaming townsfolk suddenly came to his attention. The boy repeated with much more concern, “Where’s Mother?!”

His father did not answer him, but there were flowers blooming across his brow. Ren recognized them from his mother’s book, they were her flower after all. Soft pink and large, the cherry blossoms rested unnoticed just below his father’s hairline. They were mirroring a blood trail that his father had on the opposite side of his head. It trickled down from under his hair and dripped down the side of his face.

The archer still wasn’t answering Ren’s questions.

Fragments of a conversation he’d had with his mother years ago drifted across the front of his mind. A conversation that for some reason seemed very important all of a sudden as he gazed up at his father’s distressed face. “The size and vibrancy of the blooms were dependent on the severity of the injury,” his mother seemed to whisper to him.

Ren’s father paid the petals no mind, but years later Ren would look back on those cherry blossoms and know what he hadn’t wanted to believe then. If the size of those flowers were to be believed, they were from the very wound that had killed his mother.

No green orchids bloomed when his father died, for his mother’s body was not alive to grow them.


	5. Mandevillas

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bright and vibrant, as musical as their name sake. Hardy and strong, but still needing the support of others to grow.

Nobody ever explained the flowers to Nora. She’d had nobody to do so, after all. Living alone and young and scared on the streets, she’d learned to not question certain things. The flowers existed, they just did. They didn’t hurt when they grew so she generally paid them no mind.

Yellow was the most common of the blooms, and she left a trail of daffodils behind her wherever she went. She’d string the blooms together, or keep petals in her pockets. Just something to remind her that there was life away from the streets. 

When her stomach rumbled and hunger stabbed it like hot knives, she almost wished for more flowers if only for something to eat. Whether the flowers were safe to eat or not didn’t matter. Nora thought she could endure any pain if only to stop the hunger gnawing at her belly.

Nora found out she was Ren’s soulmate on the same day he found out she was his. It was on the day that Kuroyuri was… on the day that they met.

Great black and white monsters with glowing red eyes filled the sky and the street. She had no home to run to or away from as most of the people seemed to be doing. With nowhere else to go, she’d hidden herself away under the raised floor of an already vacated house. It was only a matter of time before the monsters found her, and she had no way to defend herself.

Something touched her shoulder and she jumped. There was a boy there, telling her to be brave. Before Nora knew what she was doing, she’d thrown her arms around his shoulders.

One of the monsters screeched overhead. How could it not know where they were? A wave of calm flowed over her like cool water after a hot day. The monster flew away.

The calm feeling went away as well, and as it went, Nora’s fear returned. The worst monster of all clopped past on mismatched legs, trailing its long clawed hands behind it. She and the boy watched as it stopped in front of the house they were hiding under. They both released a breath they hadn’t known they’d been holding when it walked away.

“I’m scared,” she said, still crouched on the ground ready to bolt away. 

“Me too,” the boy said, meeting her eyes. One of Nora’s hands was still clutching his sleeve, and she grabbed him and cried out when he tried to move away. He reassured her, and she very reluctantly let him go. 

He turned and crawled away into the street, retrieving a small wooden hammer which he presented to her upon his return. “We’ll keep each other safe,” he said, sounding sure of himself, unmovable in his belief that they would be okay. “What’s your name?” he asked as she took the hammer from him and held it close to her chest.

“Nora,” she replied, feeling the barest hint of a smile flicker across her face.

“My name’s Lie Ren,” he said. Ash was still falling like corrupted snow from the sky, but Nora somehow felt more safe than she ever had before. The boy, Ren, was bleeding. He’d scraped his right hand when he’d crawled into the street, but he hadn’t seemed to notice.

“You’re bleeding!” Nora exclaimed quietly, shuffling a little closer to him and pointing with her own right hand. He glanced down at it and exclaimed quietly at something he saw.

Nora followed his gaze and saw that some of the flowers were sprouting on her hand again. Green water lilies bloomed along one side of her hand, small pale petals fanning to cover her bruised skin.

“You have my flowers…” Ren murmured, quiet amazement filling his voice as he watched them with wide eyes. The explanation of what he meant lasted until morning, and by then it was safe to leave the underbelly of the house. 

When they ventured from the ruined remains of Kuroyuri, Nora realized that she’d never actually been alone. Red, Yellow, and Green, who she now knew as Ren, had been there with her every step of the way. Lilies sprouted more from Nora now that Ren was living in the wild with her, but with Ren there to look out for her, many fewer mandevillas appeared on Ren’s body.

Traveling together led to many insightful conversations about soulmates. Of their unknown flowers, Yellow ones came the most often.  Red didn’t get hurt that often, and their injuries were small enough that the chrysanthemums were pale and small. After a while, Red’s flowers stopped blooming at all.

Yellow was an entirely different story. Scraped knees, pricked fingers, paper cuts, the daffodils were a constant companion on their travels. One time, when they were about to arrive at Beacon Academy, flowers started blooming like crazy on their arms. Nora had freaked out, but Ren was quick to provide “bike crash” as a reason. They both agreed that Yellow needed to take better care of themselves.


	6. Daffodils

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sunny disposition and bright petals to hide the strong will yet fragile nature within.

With ten people living in the household, flowers were a constant in the Arc house. A veritable rainbow of color surrounded them, so Jaune’s contributions of Green, Red, and Pink were barely noticed. At least, not by the rest of his family.

Jaune noticed them. 

When the legacy of his family grew to be too much, a light green lily would be there to calm his nerves. When he’d come home from school with middling to low grades and his parents wouldn’t say anything, but he could tell they were disappointed, the bright pink petals were there to cheer him up. 

And on his darkest days of doubt, when he wondered if he’d ever be able to amount to anything, one of the rare red chrysanthemums would help draw him out and remind him that there were people out there that needed him.

He sometimes wondered whether he irritated his soulmates with the amount of flowers they must get from him. Jaune certainly never got that many from them, and by the time he reached his early teens, he was getting next to no flowers at all. On the rare occasion that he would be graced with the small petals of a lily or one of the mandevillas he would feel like he was walking on air for the next couple of days.

Red hadn’t gotten any serious injuries since he was ten. When Green or Pink got injured he couldn’t help but be reminded of his suspiciously absent soulmate. Jaune hoped that they were okay, but with every passing day it became less likely.

Jaune hit his growth spurt, and his already not too coordinated limbs became even harder to deal with. He was certain that he’d earned his soulmates more than few flowers just from hitting his forehead on door frames that he was used to passing safely over his head. No matter how much taller than her he grew, Saphron insisted on calling him her baby brother. 

She’d found her soulmate last week, finally answering where the soft blue lobelias were coming from. Saphron wasted no time moving in with Terra, and Jaune realized that he had to get out of this house.

In the dead of night he made his mother promise to hold his sisters at bay for a couple of hours, promising to do well at Beacon. She agreed reluctantly, and his father couldn’t hide the look of pride that his son had gotten into Beacon Academy. The best of the best. 

Jaune could swear he could feel the forged transcripts burning a hole straight through his pants pockets.

He was so distracted on his ride to the shipyard that he nearly crashed his bicycle into a tree. Well, he said nearly. He did crash, but he saved himself from a head on collision by bailing out at the last second. Scrapes all the way up his arms. Thank goodness for the sturdiness of jeans, or that could’ve been much worse.

The airship ride was a nightmare, just like he knew it would be. Stupid motion sickness. His vision was blurring, and he could barely focus enough on not tripping to make it to the trash can just outside the bay doors. The armor on his shoulders sat awkwardly, making him wonder if he was wearing it wrong. Maybe he’d tightened the straps wrong or…?

An explosion, an honest to goodness explosion, shook him out of his melancholic wondering and led him to meeting a girl who seemed much too young to be here. But who was he to talk, he’d lied his way in after all. They bonded over their shared awkwardness, both failing miserably at holding up a normal conversation. 

They got to the entrance hall, the girl, Ruby, ran off to join her sister, and the headmaster gave a welcoming speech. It wasn’t that welcoming, to be honest, and Jaune’s heart sank right down to his toes at the “wasted energy” line. 

One girl, Weiss freaking Schnee, pointed him out, and he nearly tripped over his feet on his way over to her. She was talking to Ruby, and someone who he assumed was Ruby’s sister but who looked nothing like her. Jaune’s flirting went off without a hitch. Ten out of ten, nailed it, knocked it out of the park.

He was trying not to think about initiation the next day. He was especially trying not to think about how unprepared he was for initiation the next day. 

Jaune was so much more woefully unprepared than he ever could’ve guessed.

Some girl with flaming orange hair woke him up way before he would’ve liked, and then she nearly knocked him over in her rush into the dining hall. He couldn’t find which locker he put his armor in. Then he failed so abysmally at interacting with Weiss and that other girl, Pyrrha, that even he couldn’t find a spot in the conversation where he succeeded. 

Pyrrha also apparently some kind of champion in a bunch of tournaments that he’d never heard. Not to mention that she was apparently the mascot for Pumpkin Pete’s?! How cool was that!

They all lined up on the edge of a cliff, even though Jaune was pretty sure initiation was supposed to be in the forest several hundred feet below them. How the heck they were supposed to get from up here to down there was- 

-wait landing strategies?! Trying to sound less worried than he was, Jaune asked the headmaster what the actual hell he was talking about. He of course didn’t say it like that, but that’s how he should’ve said it. He could barely get a word in edgewise before he was launched into the air.

This was it! This was how he died! Jaune was screaming his lungs out as he tumbled head over heels through the air, passing by his classmates who all seemed to be handling this much better than he was. 

There was an explosion in the distance, and just as he passed through the treeline something caught the hood of his hoodie and jerked him backward. Jaune’s back impacted with the trunk of a tree so hard all the air was knocked from his lungs, and after a moment of stunned disbelief where he was convinced he was still falling he looked up. 

A red and bronze spear was impaled straight through his hood and had him pinned to the trunk of the tree. “Thank you!!” he yelled out gratefully, his voice scratchy from all the screaming in fear of his life. He recognized the spear from when it’d pinned him to the lockers only about half an hour before. Jaune hoped beyond hope that Pyrrha had pinned him here on purpose and was going to come get him down.

Because although he wasn’t falling anymore, he was still trapped about twenty feet off the ground.

“I’m sorry!” he heard Pyrrha call from the distance. What the heck was she sorry for? She’d saved him from an impact with the ground at about a million miles per hour, and the inevitable death that would’ve followed that.

He tried to tug the spear from the tree and waved lamely at Weiss Schnee when she wandered into his clearing. Then she turned around and walked away, and he was just beginning lamenting his predicament when Pyrrha arrived.

They made eye contact, and hey! Guess that made them partners. She got him down, pulling her spear back to her with some kind of wizardy powers, and they began to trek through the forest. Occasionally Jaune would hear explosions in the distance, and the increasingly apparent knowledge of how outmatched he was by all his classmates was not helping his nerves.

More explosions echoed through the trees and Jaune jumped. “Did you hear that?” he asked his partner, eyes wide and scanning the forest for any movement. Or really anything, he didn’t know what he was looking for. 

Pyrrha pushed a bush out of their way and held it there while they walked past. “Gunfire,” she responded, barely glancing over her shoulder, “It seems some of our comrades have encountered the enemy.” 

Comrades? The enemy? What kind of language was that? It was like she’d never spoken to another human being before. He was still keeping his gaze on the forest in the direction of the noise. Pyrrha held her shield up and bent a low hanging branch out of the way.

Unfortunately Jaune only realized this in time to turn back around and have it clothesline him in the face hard enough to knock him straight to the ground.

Hearing his cry of distress, Pyrrha turned. “Jaune!” she said when she saw him on the ground. Her emerald eyes narrowed slightly at how he was clutching his head, but then widened again when they traced a path up to the offending branch. “I’m sorry,” Pyrrha apologized reflexively as she crossed the clearing over to him.

“Heh, it’s okay,” he reassured her as he clambered to his feet and lowered his arms back to his sides. She was examining the cut on his face, and yeah it stung but not too badly. “It’s just...just a scratch?” His eyes narrowed. What the heck was going on with her face? 

“What’s wrong?” she asked, glancing behind her. “Did you see something?” In turning, she saw them. The daffodils. Small soft yellow petals waving in the slight breeze. Yellow had gotten hurt again.

“No I didn’t see anything over there,” Jaune said, craning his head around to look at the flowers growing in a short thin line just under her right eye. “You got some...ya know.”

“Hm? Oh yes, Yellow,” she responded absently, turning back to face him and plucking the flowers from her cheek. “They’re always getting themselves hurt. Just a few days ago they must’ve gotten scrapes-”

“-Scrapes all up and down their arms?” he completed as he arrived at a conclusion with dawning awe and a touch of horror. Was Pyrrha…?

“I… yes. How could you possibly…?” She’d realized it too. He could see it in the way one of her hands came back up to lightly touch the few flowers on her cheek, and in the way her bright green eyes fell on the shallow stinging cut on his cheek. 

A cut in exactly the same place as the daffodils were growing.


	7. Chrysanthemums

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Strong and nearly invulnerable, the final flowers to bloom before winter are the last spot of color before the night.

Pyrrha didn’t see destiny as a fate she couldn’t escape. She saw it more as a final goal to work towards her whole life. 

She’d always felt that she was destined to be a Huntress, and as time went on it became increasingly clear that she was right.

The flowers also lined up perfectly with her view on destiny. People somewhere out there in the world that would mean more to her than life itself, that she was meant to find and be with. 

Not that it would always work out. Her mother was testament to that. She’d found her soulmate when they were at the academy together. They’d been together for only a year, just long enough for her mother to realize that she’d truly found the love of her life. And also just long enough for them to be taken away.

They died, just as her mother had finally realized how much they meant to her. A month or so later, her mother found out that she was pregnant.

Pyrrha was born. Her mother doted on her and loved her more than anything, but Pyrrha could always tell that her mother’s smiles would never quite light up her eyes. They were real smiles, but there was a pain in them that Pyrrha wouldn’t understand until her mother sat her down and explained why there was a flower arrangement blooming in speckles across her knees and elbows.

The deep red lilies in vases around the house suddenly made much more sense as well.

If she was going to become a Huntress, Pyrrha knew that she’d have to work, and study, and train harder than she thought was possible. She enrolled in combat as soon as she could, and she rose rapidly through the ranks. She was a natural, awakening her aura sooner than any of her classmates. Her semblance followed soon after, and she learned quickly that hiding her ability to control metal would be much more useful than advertising her ability.

She entered her first tournament when she was thirteen. Pyrrha burned her way through the ranks, rocketing to the top and winning the tournament with flying colors. When she stood on the victor’s podium or the first time, all she could notice was how far away everyone else seemed. How they seemed to look at her differently.

Years passed. The tournaments began to blur together, and she won each one by a vast margin. She became the face for Pumpkin Pete’s cereal, which was pretty cool, even if the cereal itself was incredibly unhealthy. The public loved her and that was amazing, but in private nobody would talk to her for her. The pedestal she was on only seemed to get taller by the day.

She began to wonder when she had started to separate Pyrrha Nikos, the champion of Mistral, from Pyrrha Nikos, the girl born with the power to draw things together who seemed to do nothing but separate herself from everyone. Hopefully Yellow, Pink, and Green would see her differently, or indeed see her at all.

Pyrrha committed to going to Beacon, disappointing everyone in Argus who would’ve rather she stayed at home. Her mother understood, brushed her bangs back from her eyes, and told her to stay safe. The worry in her mother’s green eyes, so like Pyrrha’s own, had her nodding and agreeing despite herself. 

She waved one hand at her mother as she boarded the airship, promising to visit during the break after the Vytal Festival. While sitting on board, a crop of daffodils bloomed up and down her arms, joining the plethora of similar blooms she got on a nearly daily basis. Pyrrha’s Aura and skills had prevented any serious injuries for years now. Sometimes she wondered whether her soulmates were worried about her.

Going to Beacon changed everything. Not immediately of course, these things took time.

Before initiation, people came up to her for autographs and to take pictures, and Pyrrha’s heart sank when the hope that it would be different here wilted. When the hall was mostly full and everyone finally left her alone, a tall blonde boy and a short girl with a red cape wandered into the hall. The girl zipped off in a cloud of what Pyrrha could swear were rose petals, the boy lamented that he wouldn’t be able to find another nice quirky girl to talk to, and as Pyrrha watched him, she wondered if she was even capable of being that kind of girl anymore.

In the locker room before initiation, she was confronted by a pale white haired girl. ‘Weiss Schnee, heiress to the Schnee Dust Company,’ her mind provided helpfully. They had never met, only known each other by reputation, but it had rapidly become abundantly clear that Weiss was familiar with a pedestal of her own. 

It must be a different sort of pedestal, though, because Weiss could not make it more clear that Pyrrha’s reputation was all she cared about.

The blonde boy she’d seen in the entrance hall butted into their conversation, and he was flirting so obviously and so badly with Weiss that she almost felt sorry for him. He introduced himself to the two of them, and it was only after Weiss was forced to introduce her that Pyrrha realized Jaune didn’t know who she was.

After years of living on her distant pedestal, it didn’t seem possible that she’d ever meet someone who didn’t know who she was, but here she was.

Suddenly her pedestal didn’t feel quite as distant and unreachable, because Jaune Arc didn’t even know that it existed. And she had his flowers.

Pyrrha found her other two soulmates. Nora, as bright and bouncy as the flowers she embodied, and Ren, whose water lilies were as still and calm as the man himself. Finally she’d found the people who saw her for herself, and not as Pyrrha Nikos, the Invincible Girl.

The first few semesters were the happiest of her life. She made friendships that would last her for the rest of her life, and she finally felt like she could be a Huntress for herself instead of that just being what she was meant to do.

Jaune Arc was the brightest spot in all of this.

She activated his Aura in the Emerald Forest, trained with him on the rooftops, and danced with him at the ball. They just _fit_ together, in a way that she’d never had with anyone. And with him she felt like the pedestal wasn’t there at all.

If only she could get him to see her in the way she saw him. After the dance, he seemed to come to a realization, but neither of them stepped forward, too afraid of what the other would say. Pyrrha would gladly wait forever, she was just happy to be a part of his life.

Then came the Vytal Festival, and everything went wrong.

Suddenly there was magic, and there were Maidens, and the teachers wanted her to take on the biggest responsibility anybody could be asked to take, and _this was her purpose_.

Pyrrha was falling apart, and she knew that. Nora tried to lift her spirits, Ren tried to keep her focused, and Jaune tried to understand. She closer to laying out her feelings than she thought she ever would, a crack appeared in her mask.

That crack widened.

Penny. Would anyone grow petals for her?

Her pedestal collapsed, and she was buried in the rubble.

The Grimm were everywhere. Civilians and Hunters alike were blooming left and right as countless people fell to the onslaught. They lost track of team RWBY, but in the screaming there was no way to find them again. The Headmaster summoned her away, and she nearly cried when Jaune refused to leave her side. 

Then she was screaming. Pain like fire and hunger filled her system, and it was over before it began.

That woman, one of her classmates, an exchange student, shot the Maiden through the chest. She was dead, and trapped. In their fading connection, Pyrrha felt the woman die.

Ozpin sent her and Jaune away, they’d only get in his way.

Outside the tower, the giant flying Grimm circled overhead. Jaune was scrambling for help, begging for answers, and then begging her to stay. But she couldn’t. This was her purpose, to fight the good fight until there was nobody left to defend.

Oh Jaune, I wish we had more time.

The kiss wasn’t nearly long enough, and they _fit_ together. And when he pulled her closer and kissed her back, she nearly changed her mind right then and there. 

When they pulled apart, she looked into his confused blue eyes one last time, whispered an apology, and sent him away. His begging broke her heart, shattered it into tiny pieces, far too small for any possible repair.

Her pedestal was gone, it had fallen in that fight with Penny, but as she watched him fly away she’d never felt further removed from anyone in her life.


	8. Roses

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The most widely used symbol of love. Familial, romantic, platonic. A little love was what the world needed right then, but nobody was around to give it.

The same green zinnias that she’d bloomed across her hands when she’d found out Penny was a robot were falling from her in droves. Stripes across her torso and arms of green petals distracted her for long enough that she missed nearly all of that woman’s speech over the intercoms.

Guess that finally answered Penny’s question about whether she was real.

Sometime into the battle she started bleeding purple petals, matching where she later found out that Blake had been stabbed by Adam. She never got to see the wound for herself, because Blake had already ran by the time she woke up on Patch.

Only moments later yellow petals with black centers bloomed in such frequency and vibrancy on her arm that she was certain her sister had died. Seeing them bloom had nearly made her fall off her scythe before she touched down on the ground.

When she found the others, Sun and Neptune were watching over the rest of her team, along with Ren and Nora. Weiss was battered but mostly okay, but Blake and Yang were another story.

They looked like they were laying in a field of flowers. Blake was too distraught to see the beauty, and Yang was unconscious. Ruby had never seen anything so terrible in all her life.

She and Weiss went to find and retrieve Jaune and Pyrrha. Nora and Ren insisted, and their lack of petals was a testament to the fact that their two teammates were still alive.

They got a call from Jaune, who was too distraught for words. Neither of them had ever heard him like that. Weiss held her ground with the Grimm, and she went up the tower to help Pyrrha.

She was too late to save Pyrrha, and just in time to see her get shot through the chest.

* * *

Sun and Neptune had to hold Ren and Nora back when they started blooming chrysanthemums for the first time in years. They could barely walk, but it was still all the two boys could do to keep the two of them from charging back into the battle.

Port and Oobleck were counting in their minds, tallying off the students that had made it out of the masacre. Far too many hadn’t been accounted for yet.

They couldn’t tear their eyes away from the tower where there was evidence of a battle, where at least one of their students was fighting for their life. The Wyvern dived towards the top, and then flames like a bonfire filled the sky. 

Ruby was unconscious by the time Qrow got to her on the roof. That giant Grimm was frozen into stone, and the other girls he’d been sent to retrieve were nowhere to be seen. A pile of broken bronze armor and a golden circlet lay in a pile of ash.

Glynda had seen her fair share of death in her years as a Huntress, and as a teacher. But it never hurt any less to see a student die far before their prime. So many bright minds were gone far too soon tonight. Either by Grimm, the Robots, the White Fang, or…

A girl with bright red hair, bright green eyes, and an even brighter smile flickered across her mind.

So many dead. Their lights gone from the world.

She found Jaune Arc nearly catatonic in a field of chrysanthemums. 

He was unresponsive, and nothing she did could tear his gaze from the red flowers that covered his hands like drops of blood. 

Qrow jogged past with his niece in his arms, and a bundle of too-familiar armor on his back. Glynda didn’t have to ask what had happened, just had to ask for his help in getting the one of her students that she’d found back to the safety she hadn’t been able to give them all.

* * *

A million miles away, dark lands were covered in flows of oozing red liquid.

A woman with chalk white skin etched with dark red lines stared dispassionately down at the curling leaves of ivy that crawled along her arms. 

So. He was dead then. 

Good.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's the end of that. Hope you all enjoyed it. I might write more in this universe, if y'all are interested or have any ideas. Thanks for reading!


End file.
